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The web responds to the death of hacker-activist Aaron Swartz

The open web and freedom of information in general lost one of their most passionate proponents yesterday, with the death of early Reddit staffer and Demand Progress founder Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide on Friday, according to a family member. He was facing federal charges for hacking into the JSTOR academic database and downloading millions of research papers, but had also reportedly suffered from depression. He was 26 years old.

As the news of his death spread throughout the web and social networks like Twitter, there was an outpouring of grief and sorrow from some of his friends and those he had worked with on a number of projects — including the early development of the RSS syndication standard, the web.py software framework, the Creative Commons movement and the W3C web standards committee.

Update: Swartz’s family and his partner have released a statement about his death, in which they point the finger of blame directly at the U.S. Attorney’s office and say their prosecution played a role in Aaron’s suicide. The statement says:

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, posted a message after he learned of the news, saying: “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”

“Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturber… we have all lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it.”

Matt Haughey, the founder of Metafilter, posted a comment on his site about Aaron, whom he met while he was working on the Creative Commons project with Larry Lessig — and how at one programming event, Swartz had to come with his father because he was only 15:

“Aaron, I’m so sorry to see you go. You were an amazing person who did incredible work that helps us all out and I really wish you stayed for many more decades so you could continue making society a better place to be. I’ll really miss you.”

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, posted a memorial entitled “Aaron Swartz, hero of the open world, dies” — and recalled working with the young man on Kahle’s Open Library project, which he helped to code:

“Aaron was steadfast in his dedication to building a better and open world. Selfless. Willing to cause change. He is among the best spirits of the Internet generation. I am crushed by his loss, but will continue to be enlightened by his work and dedication. May a hero and founder of our open world rest in peace.”

In 2007, Swartz wrote what many took to be a suicide note (thanks to Nik Cubrilovic for the link) after he had been fired by Conde Nast (which acquired Reddit in 2006), a note that eventually led Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to call the police and break into Swartz’s apartment. The young programmer later explained that he wrote it while he was in pain due to a medical issue, but some friends took it as a sign that he was struggling with emotional problems as well.

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In 2007, Philipp Lenssen of the blog Google Blogoscoped posted a long interview with Swartz about his development as a programmer, his work with Reddit and Creative Commons, getting fired by Conde Nast and a number of other topics:

“Seriously, though, the Web is what we make of it. We have a powerful, widely-deployed, largely uncontrolled communication network. It’s up to us to decide where to go next.”

John Gruber of the Apple blog Daring Fireball also posted a tribute, saying: “Aaron was a friend and a brilliant mind… he had an enormous intellect — again, a brilliant mind — but also an enormous capacity for empathy. He was a great person. I’m dumbfounded and heartbroken.”

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Swartz was also involved in the fight against SOPA, the draconian anti-piracy law that Congress tried to pass last year — this is a video of him discussing the campaign against the bill, which was later shelved:

Many of those who mourned Swartz’s passing wondered whether he knew how respected and loved he was by those who were close to him:

Larry Lessig, who worked with Swartz on Creative Commons and other projects, has written a post saying what his young friend did with the JSTOR archive was wrong — although the principle may have been right — but that the government’s case against him was reprehensible and over-reaching in the extreme: “Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way.”

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According to those who knew him, Swartz believed that it was wrong to charge so much for access to these papers, many of which were produced by academics for free, and in some cases with government funding (Maria Bustillos has a great overview of the case here). And even though JSTOR said it didn’t want to proceed with a case against him (and has since opened up its database — at least a little) the Department of Justice continued with its case, and Swartz faced a potential 35 years in prison.

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Bradley Horowitz of Google, and formerly of Yahoo, remembered talking with Swartz about his plans to use Hangouts for journalistic purposes around the Occupy Wall Street movement:

“I was really heart-broken by this news… Thank you Aaron, for all you contributed to the world, and inspiring so many.”

“I ask that the contents of all my hard drives be made publicly available from aaronsw.com… please update the footer of this page with a link. Also email the relevant lists and set up an autoresponder for my email address to email people who write to me. Feel free to publish things people say about me on the site. Oh, and BTW, I’ll miss you all.”

This is a photo of the teenaged Aaron Swartz meeting Creative Commons founder and copyright activist Larry Lessig (photo by Richard Gibson)

Web pioneer and Harvard fellow Doc Searls wrote a memorial post for Swartz, along with a picture of him at a conference with Dave Winer — a conference Swartz had to be driven to by his mom, since he was only 15 — and said: “We haven’t just lost a good man, but the better world he was helping to make.”

Alex Macgillivray, general counsel at Twitter and former Google lawyer, said:

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A comment on the discussion thread on the Y Combinator site Hacker News that appeared to be from Swartz’s mother said: “Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful. Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable.”

The website public.resource.org — founded by freedom-of-information activist Carl Malamud, who worked with Swartz after with his earlier hack of the federal PACER archive — has gone dark as a tribute, with text that reads in part “Aaron Swartz made our world more free. Thank you Aaron for what you gave us.”

Microsoft research and sociologist Danah Boyd has written about the boy/man she knew for the past nine years, and how he could be both brilliant and frustrating — but she says the thing that makes her the angriest is how unreasonable his prosecution was: “He became a toy for a government set on showing their strength. And they bullied him and preyed on his weaknesses and sought to break him. And they did.”

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David Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has a post on his blog in which he calls Aaron Swartz not a hacker but “a builder.” And Weinberger points (as many others have) to a post from Alex Stamos, an expert in information technology who was an expert witness in Swartz’s case, who argues that his downloading of JSTOR articles wasn’t a criminal hack: “I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.”

Micah Sifry of TechPresident remembers meeting Aaron in 2004, when he was 18, and being impressed with how dedicated he was: “I don’t know where he got the bug, but I understood it. If you have “change the world” disease, there is only one cure. And he tried mightily to change the world using every tool at his disposal.” And Dan Gillmor argues that we should remember Aaron by working for open society and against government abuses: “So amid my grief for Aaron, I’m angry — and committed to working for honorable enforcement of rational laws, and for values Aaron exemplified in his short life.”

[tweet https://twitter.com/dangillmor/status/290152893217124353]

James Grimmelmann, a law professor at New York Law School who knew Swartz well, writes about some of the incredible things that he accomplished at such a young age: “Aaron was a friend, and more than that, he was one of my heroes. No one I have known better embodied the bumper-sticker motto to “be the change you wish to see in the world.” It is hard to believe he is gone.” And Glenn Greenwald writes at The Guardian about what he calls the “inspiring heroism” of Aaron Swartz — he didn’t just talk about internet freedom and civil liberties, Greenwald says, “He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values and challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that were their enemies. That’s what makes him, in my view, so consummately heroic.”

A number of academics have tried to honor Swartz’s commitment to open information by making their journal articles free to download. And Quinn Norton, who was Swartz’s girlfriend for a time, has written a heart-wrenching post about their time together here.

71 Responses to “The web responds to the death of hacker-activist Aaron Swartz”

I’ve been reading a lot of the online tributes (including this one) to Aaron Swartz, who I hadn’t heard of before his suicide Friday, although I use RSS daily, and am starting to explore Reddit. I think Dave Winer’s thread (http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/january/onlineGrieving) about grieving is pretty much on the mark – we do need to be more aware of the monumental pressures on young, brilliant minds like Swartz’. But I think it’s more than just that. I think that what we’re suffering from is a devaluing of humanity, and these young men as much as the rest of us – maybe more so because they themselves are a “product”. Our value isn’t our mode of production, or how we organize our society, or our monetary savings, or how many children we have, or whatever. Our value is that we are alive. That we are living creatures, who think, feel, create and destroy. And that value is beyond all price. And it’s cumulative – we all are worth more because we are each priceless beings. When we lose someone, we are all affected. When we lose someone because they believe they no longer have any value, our collective worth is diminished.

Didn’t know Aaron nor had I ever heard of him but I am deeply saddened from humanities loss of knowledge and our ignorance of what advances our true future; The Human Mind. Collectively it is the sum of knowledge & our ability to use & support it that determines our futures. The loss of Aaron’s great mind is a loss to all of humanity. JPinkham

Thank you for sharing this long, detailed, and link heavy obituary that provides many primary sources so we can hear and read Aaron’s own words and reasoning. Let’s remember that a better, smarter, and more humane government would have supported Aaron’s work instead of prosecuting him and threatening him with life in prison for sharing information and academic articles.

We need a non-repudiable cryptographic protocol for developers and cryptographers who are committing suicide. For the sake of surviving family and friends, we can socially encourage (“a promise”) protocol of leaving a cryptographically-signed note of any length and content. If we can define a convention for archiving our words, we can define a social convention for signing our last words.

It’s easy to assume that those who have suffered with depression or have expressed suicidal thoughts are more likely to commit suicide. But like everything else in life, non-suicide is a skill that grows with experience. Going to the edge and returning makes one more likely, not less likely, to return from future edges.

Emotions differentiate us from our machines and data. As we all benefit from the technical creativity of our emotional geniuses, it is in our collective interest to develop a social vocabulary to talk about suicide with our talented friends. As a percentage of the overall population it may be small, but as a percentage of our world-changing youth, it is too high.

“Aaronâ€™s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorneyâ€™s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorneyâ€™s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own communityâ€™s most cherished principles.”

“For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House â€” and where even those brought to â€œjusticeâ€ never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled â€œfelons.â€

In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a â€œfelon.â€ For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April â€” his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge..

Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the â€œIâ€™m right so Iâ€™m right to nuke youâ€ ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.”

“He read to me and Ada compulsively; he read me a whole David Foster Wallace book. He read Robert Caro to me, countless articles, blog posts, snippets of books. Sometimes, he would call, just read, and hang up. He loved the Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, and the three of us read it together many times. We loved George Saunders. We loved so many things together.”

A. As Matthew points out, you didn’t know him.
B. Every hacker lives in their parents’ basement? Nice to see your refinement and intelligence coming out there.
C. He had depression. That’s the first thing this post said so you should have known at least that if nothing else about this man. If you’ve never experienced depression, be thankful and very grateful, but don’t ever disparage someone who has it or any other disease. You have no idea what life is like for them.

Good article. But with respect to the deceased, especially his family and those close to him, I appreciate your words and where your coming from, but i find the term “lost” that you have used always a bit strange. Aaron “took” his own life, it was never “lost”…it was always there for him to take advantage of. Tragic nonetheless.

Unlike you, Swartz has been a positive influence in my life – I use RSS every single day. I bet, among my friends, a fair number will say that he helped their lives. So, how many say that about you? And I live in Sweden, a place where I bet not A. Single. Person. has heard about you.

This is a truly tragic, and meaningful post. I was unaware of this man, but now feel great sorrow at that fact. May he rest peacefully, his legacy grow and continue to do so, and his family be allowed as much peace, time and the respect they deserve. thank you for posting this.